It has heretofore been proposed to provide vehicles with ramp means so that a wheel chair, boat, tractor or the like may be wheeled up the ramp onto the floor of the vehicle. Typical of such vehicles is that shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,193,321 to Rose of July 6, 1965, where the ramp is simply the down swinging rear door of a horse trailer or the like. A similar down swinging rear door to a trailer is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,711,882 to Iller of Jan. 23, 1973.
However, these are special purpose vehicles and not passenger carrying vehicles of the automobile-bus type.
For such passenger carrying automobiles it has been proposed to provide a ramp for a side door wherein the ramp slides out from under the floor and rests on the door sill as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,717,303 and 1,884,513 to Barclay of June 11, 1929 and Oct. 25, 1932 respectively, the vehicles shown having the high rooves of the day and there being no problem of the patient seated in the wheel chair having his head strike the roof or being unable to see out the windows. A side door foldable ramp is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,651,965 to Simonelli of Mar. 28, 1972, which appears to be an elevator but the floor of the vehicle is at conventional height and the ramp is not fixed pivoted to the side edge of the floor.
In addition to the above, there are patents on vehicles having sliding side doors and lowered floor portions such as U.S. Pat. No. 1,777,966 to Fageol of Oct. 7, 1930, U.S. Pat. No. 2,233,181 to Quartullo of Feb. 25, 1941 and U.S. Pat. No. 2,480,047 to Reinhard of Aug. 23, 1949. However, these patents do not disclose a lowered floor portion between a driver's seat and passenger seats, the driver usually standing on the lowered floor while driving and there are no ramps associated with such vehicles.